How do folks handle contacts that are Organisations?

[chiebert]

Just trying to include 'friends' of the parish, that are organisations (neighbouring parishes, businesses, etc.). How are folk handling these? I'm thinking 'family', but then classifications can't be used. I suppose one could create a Family Property as a workaround, but I'm curious whether there are other options folk are practicing...

[crossan007]

I've got them as a family, and then as a separate "Classification"

[chiebert]

Ah, so I assume that, since Classifications are for Persons, that you're adding a contact Person for the organisation... This works, since only Persons can be added to Groups...

The only downside I see to that approach is that, if your contact person for that 'family'/organisation moves away or changes, the Classification will move with the person, if you're not careful. I don't see that being a huge problem for us right now, but it might be something to add to the feature list: being able to Classify a whole 'family', or allowing one to characterise a 'Family' as an 'organisation'. And generally, being able to add an 'organisation'/family to a group.

Here's real-world situation I'm facing: Newsletters. Besides individuals who have signed up for our newsletter (e- and paper), we also have several neighbouring parishes and other organisations on the list(s) - sometimes these orgs' contact persons have their own email addresses, but the org also has its own, more stable, email address. It would be good to be able to add the org itself to a Group for communications purposes (because I still haven't figured out how to use the 'Newsletter' flag in a 'Family').

Any of that make sense? Am I missing something(s) that is(are) already in ChurchCRM?

[dleigh]

I was thinking of writing another question/enhancement request, but this one appears to be on the same topic. In our communications strategy that we're forming right now, we see a need to be able to communicate with different groups of people/organizations - some of which are members and attendees and belong to families, etc. but some of which are not: organizations, local authorities, other churches, frequent "event attendees" who do not attend the church, the leaders in the church network we belong to, etc. So to me, having some "generic CRM" functionality would be VERY helpful. At the moment, we looked at other "generic CRM" offerings (like SuiteCRM) but found that you spend an ENORMOUS amount of time "stepping around" all their commercial/marketing/sales functionality that it becomes a VERY unwieldy solution.

So I'd love to see some abilities to:

• add individuals who do not belong to a family but who have other identifying criteria that show that they belong to a given "category" of contact (group participation would work as would additional person fields to identify them) - it would just be nice if they didn't have to have a family record as well.
• add organizations with associated contact individuals. In this case the family/member model would work very well, but we'd simply need some more generic nomenclature.

At any rate, this sort of additional CRM capability would be very welcome!

[crossan007]

I've been considering renaming "family" to "organization" with different types: [family, church, business, event, etc]. Thoughts?

[crossan007]

Additionally, "roles" could be extended to ["primary contact", "technical contact", "sales","support", etc]

[dleigh]

That might just do it. I think it would be worth teasing that out (i.e. get into the details of how that would work out with the current data structure and code). I think that simple change might really add significant new capabilities.

[chiebert]

Me again - Semantically, I agree that Churches/Organisations are akin to 'Families'. And being able to give the renamed Family/Organisation entity a 'type', as @crossan007 suggests above, is great.

The only remaining problem is, I'd love to be able to add such an Organisation/Church/Family to a Group. I am the 'regional dean' in an Anglican diocese, and as such I need to keep in contact with the churches in my region, as well as related individuals from those churches. If these churches were 'Families', I couldn't just dump them into a Group for my region.

Although, I suppose I could use a Property for this... But that smells a bit to me...

Overall, though, I agree with the 'Family' approach.

[chiebert]

I retract the 'I could use a Property for this' thought. I was mixing properties with 'query parameters' in the database (I've been messing with these again, as per #2473). I had hoped I could create a 'Property' for 'families' (organisations) with a value constrained to some pre-set choices. However, you can only give properties a single text-based free-form value (which you can't search/filter on, without making a custom query...).

[chiebert]

If the scope of the Family entity is broadened to include organisations, you have to account for People being members of multiple 'family/organisation' entities. I.e., someone could quite conceivably be a contact person for a Church, but also the member of a Family that's being tracked in the CRM.

Right now, there's no way to assign a single Person to multiple Families.

[crossan007]

@chiebert this is a very good point which hadn't occurred to me.

To this point - with considerations for changing donations from Family oriented to person oriented (#336), how might dual-family membership affect donation reports? specifically since a request was made to be able to maintain a "total family giving" report in the case of a family with multiple givers.

[crossan007]

@chiebert relating to "Properties" - Might (optionally) adding "custom properties" via a setting on the property to the fields queried by the multi-search box solve this dilemma?

[chiebert]

@crossan007 re total family giving: waaaaaay back when I was wrestling with CiviCRM, I noticed that they had a pretty robust way of dealing with 'soft credits' - in other words, the donor got the 'hard credit' but could allocate the amount as 'soft credits' to various related entities. So, when someone donates, their 'Person' record gets the hard credit, but their Family could get the soft credit from everyone in that Family. CiviCRM also had separate entities for Family and Organisation (and Person). So, you could be associated with multiple Organisations, but only with one Family. I suspect that's actually what needs to happen here. Organisations and Families (think 'households') do function differently...

[chiebert]

@crossan007 re properties: I'm not sure that would help me in this situation. My concern is that, since the custom properties that take an additional free-form text sub-property, are just that - free-form - the user might mis-type the sub-property (in my case, the name of the Region. If they've misspelled it badly enough, then I can't even use a custom query to find all entities that have the 'Region' property set to 'Selkirk', because I'd miss the ones misspelled as 'Seklirk' or 'Selkik'

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